Red Mutiny (46 page)

Once Negru learned of the
Potemkin's
acceptance of his terms, he set off for the battleship. He arrived on board at noon with several soldiers at his side and a Romanian flag. He asked the sailors to lower the St. Andrew's flag from the mast. The crew removed their caps and bowed their heads, to avoid seeing the blue, yellow, and red vertical tricolor raised on the mast. Afterward, a signal from the port gave them permission to enter the harbor and disembark. The anchor was weighed. The
Potemkin
moved slowly forward. Several minutes later, the order came to cast anchor for the final time. When the battleship was secure, one of the boatswains cried out in anguish, "This is where we end up, comrades. We're no longer sailors, but free men deprived of their homeland."

The sailors gathered their belongings. Some stripped the battleship of anything of value they could find—binoculars, chronometers, and officer uniforms—an act that Matyushenko and the other revolutionaries abhorred but did not stop. While the landing boats were lowered into the waters, the sailors bid farewell to one another and their home at sea.

As the men left the battleship, the torpedo boat
Ismail
weighed anchor and cut smoothly out of the harbor. Its crew, always reluctant supporters of the mutiny and bound by the threat of sinking if they abandoned the battleship, had decided to return to Sevastopol to seek the tsar's mercy. Distracted by the disembarkation and knowing the loss of the
Ismail
made no difference now, the
Potemkin's
crew let the torpedo boat leave unscathed.

Throughout the afternoon, a flotilla of boats ferried the sailors from the battleship into the port. As one sailor remembered it, "There was no joking, no laughter, no conversation. Nothing was heard." Many of the crew would recall for the rest of their lives the solemn moment they cast away from the battleship.

Ensign Alekseyev and the petty officers were among the first to come ashore. They went straight to the Russian consul to beg for return passage to Sevastopol. Signalman Vedenmeyer, who had betrayed the crew in Odessa when the guns were fired on the city, guaranteed for himself the tsar's pardon by taking the
Potemkin'
s secret naval codebooks before the Romanians could confiscate them.

The ship's leaders disembarked last. Kovalenko wore civilian clothes. He had packed his uniform, officer dagger, and engineer medals, planning to give them away once he landed. That life was over for him. Even so, although he knew the sailors had little choice but to surrender, he was reluctant to depart the
Potemhin.
Kirill was so overwhelmed with despair that in his long memoir about his participation in the mutiny, he wrote only that the episode was too emotional to re-count. Matyushenko bid farewell to his "brave little ship" and descended into a launch, resigned to abandoning the
Potemkin
but not bitterly dejected. True, he thought, the men were giving up a powerful force that might have been used for the revolutionary cause; nevertheless, for eleven days, they had shaken the very foundation of the tsar's hold over Russia.

Stepping onto the quay, carrying duffel bags with their few possessions, the sailors found themselves in the midst of an astonishing scene. Rather than walking into a trap, as some had expected, the men were engulfed by hundreds of Romanians, offering them a hero's welcome. The people of Constanza shook hands with the sailors and clapped them on the back. Some invited crew members into their homes; others wanted to exchange their hats for sailor caps. Cheers rang out for the
Potemkin
as the sailors threaded through the crowd. Matyushenko was deeply moved by this heartfelt reception.

The sailors gathered in a city square near the port. Matyushenko had brought twenty-four thousand rubles from the battleship's safe, and, with the help of several others, he distributed the money evenly among the men (they received roughly half a year's pay). When this was done, he stepped forward to address the crew for the final time. His voice was clear and strong:

Dear comrades! We've shaken the dust of our dear motherland from our feet and have stepped onto the soil of a foreign country. Russia, our fathers and mothers, our wives and our children are left across the Black Sea. We didn't abandon our motherland. Rather, those who oppress our people took it away from us. We struggled fairly. We wanted to achieve freedom not only for ourselves but for all the people. But nothing came of it. We didn't make it, but those who are left in Russia, millions of workers and peasants, will succeed. And one day we'll be back in Russia to build a new life. Don't forget these great days. Don't forget each other. Farewell!

Then Matyushenko disappeared into the crowd; the Russian secret police were already on his trail. Over in the harbor, seawater gushed into the
Potemkin's
lower holds. Resolved to keep their revolutionary battleship out of the tsar's hands, Matyushenko had ordered several sailors to open the seacocks before they disembarked. The
Potemkin
sank steadily.

The revolutionary is a doomed man.

—MIKHAIL BAKUNIN,
Revolutionary Catechism

B
EFORE MIDNIGHT
, Matyushenko, Kirill, and Kovalenko boarded a train to Bucharest. Given their role in the mutiny, they feared the port was too dangerous a place to remain in, particularly since the Russian fleet was on its way to Constanza. They were accompanied by Dr. Rakovsky and Russian émigré Professor Arbore-Ralli, who lived in Bucharest and had offered to share his small house with the men until they decided what to do with their freedom. Matyushenko already knew: he would persist in his fight against the tsar. Death alone would stop him.

In Constanza, many sailors spent their first evening off the
Potemkin
in a state of bittersweet celebration. They had escaped the tsar's clutches but had left their homeland, possibly for good, and they needed to find work and new homes. Some got drunk, trying to release eleven days of intense pressure by finding the bottom of a vodka bottle. Others spent the night recounting their adventure to the city's workers before finding their way to the soldier barracks that General Angelesku had cleared for them on the city's outskirts. Of the entire crew, only forty-seven, including Ensign Alekseyev and most of the petty officers, had gone to the Russian consulate, pleaded their innocence, and requested to be returned to Sevastopol. They would not find the welcome they thought they deserved from the Black Sea Fleet commander.

Immediately on learning of the battleship's surrender, Vice Admiral Chukhnin telegrammed the tsar with the good news: the
Potemkin
would soon return to Sevastopol in loyal hands. Relieved that the nightmare had finally ended, Nicholas managed to play his first game of tennis in weeks, a sufficiently momentous occasion to receive mention in his diary at the mutiny's end. Nonetheless, the diplomatic and political fallout from the
Potemkin
had only just begun.

Controversy surrounded the simple act of regaining control of the battleship. When Rear Admiral Pisarevsky reached Constanza with his squadron early on the morning of June 26, he found the
Potemkin
half sunk in the harbor and flying the Romanian flag. After deriding Captain Negru for this offense, he alternated between demanding the battleship's release and insisting that Jews were responsible for the entire affair. Negru calmly told him that he would see what he could do about the former. Over the next several hours, the diplomatic wrangling rose to the highest levels of both governments. King Carol settled the matter. He agreed to release the battleship without further delay, but Romania would not renege on its agreement with the
Potemkin
sailors and deport them.

Later that day, Pisarevsky raised the St. Andrew's flag over the battleship and a priest splashed holy water on its deck to drive away "the revolutionary demons." Lieutenant Yanovich then took command of the battleship, having arrived with the squadron. He would have preferred the glory of sinking the
Potemkin
rather than overseeing its return to the naval base, an assignment that required pumping water out of the battleship's hull and then slowly towing it back to Sevastopol, since its engines were crippled.

While these events unfolded, Russian and international newspapers weighed in on the mutiny's import. A letter published in
Russkoye Slovo
argued that the
Potemkin
revealed the reasons for the Tsushima disaster: the tsar's navy was a pathetic folly. Challenging the censors again,
Nasha Zhizn
concluded that the mutiny "shows that the sea of Russian life is restless to its very depths and that the rift between the government and the people has reached deeper into the masses." Its liberal cousin,
Russkiye Vedomosti,
denied official claims that the
Potemkin
was merely the result of propaganda efforts of "student-Jews," likening this explanation to blaming the flame for the fire. Loyalist papers tried to hold the line, one opining that "There were no true Russian sailors on the
Potemkin...
. The Russian military will always be outside politics." A
Novoye Vremya
editorial called for better naval staffing and the need for counter-revolutionary forces to rally in defense of the monarchy. The only laggards were the socialist journals, whose writers were still preparing their screeds about the
Potemkin'
s revolutionary significance.

The foreign press offered no such delay, reporting the mutiny's end side by side with news that the Japanese were successfully invading Sakhalin Island. The British
Daily Telegraph
now judged the mutiny "the broadest of broad farces," which would not change the Russian government's position on either peace or reform. The leftist French paper
Temps Nouveaux
countered that the mutiny revealed that the revolution was entering an "acute stage." Several German newspapers debated whether the Romanians were right to provide the Russian sailors safe harbor in their country. A
New York Times
editorial said they were but, more important, reckoned that "the moral for Russia of these disastrous events is to agree with her adversary [Japan] quickly and so save what she still has left, in Europe as well as in Asia."

This was not a decision for Chukhnin to make. Besides, he was already frantically occupied with holding on to his command, especially after Nicholas replaced Admiral Avelan with Vice Admiral Aleksei Birilev the day after the
Potemkin'
s surrender. To stave off the same fate, Chukhnin cast a wide net of blame for the mutiny, from Vice Admiral Krieger and Rear Admiral Vishnevetsky, whom he dismissed, down to the newest recruits. He purged hundreds of sailors from the fleet, sending them to the army or to distant posts. In a note to Birilev, he also suggested mandatory retirement for many of his commanders, calling them "weak, indecisive, lazy, and incompetent." Only Chukhnin himself emerged as blameless. Although several naval officers appealed to Birilev to institute serious reforms, including reduced terms of service and improved living conditions for sailors, the new naval minister largely disregarded them.

Instead, the Admiralty focused on punishing the mutineers. After saving his own skin, Chukhnin made this his sole mission as Black Sea Fleet commander. Sevastopol became as much a prison as a naval base. Sailors were held in the fortress cells and on the training vessel
Prut.
While his prosecutors prepared the
Potemkin
investigation and pressed King Carol to return the mutiny's ringleaders, the court-martial of forty-four
Prut
sailors proceeded apace. Begun on July 20 in an aerial balloon hanger on Sevastopol's outskirts, the trials were guarded by a battalion of soldiers and two torpedo boats in the bay. Aleksandr Petrov and three other ringleaders proudly declared their guilt, earning themselves death sentences. Sixteen others received hard labor, eight prison, and the rest were acquitted. Chukhnin had insisted that the entire crew be prosecuted, but the tsar and his naval minister wanted a swift trial, so Chukhnin dropped his demand.

Denying appeals for clemency, the Black Sea Fleet commander held the executions outside the fortress on August 24. Gendarmes tied Petrov, Titov, Adamenko, and Cherny to stakes and cast canvas hoods over them. Then they gave a line of sailor recruits rifles and surrounded these men with soldiers. If the recruits hesitated to execute the convicted, an officer warned, the soldiers would shoot
them.
Before the officer dropped his handkerchief to signal fire, Titov managed to remove his hood with his teeth so he could stare down the firing squad. Under his hood, Petrov yelled defiantly, "You will have accomplished nothing. Thousands will come to take our place." They were his last words.

In the same month, Chukhnin tried seventy-five
St. George
sailors, including Koshuba, who had been transferred from Theodosia. Koshuba and two others were awarded death sentences to be carried out in front of the entire fleet. Nineteen of their crewmates were sentenced to a total of 185 years of hard labor. Without deliberation, Chukhnin rejected their appeals as well.

When Matyushenko heard of the executions of his comrades, it only furthered his determination to strike against the tsar's regime once again. After his first meeting with Lenin in Geneva, the two had sat down a few more times. Lenin expounded on how a close-knit band of revolutionaries was needed to topple the tsar from his throne, no matter the cost in blood or wrecked lives. Matyushenko never fell under his spell, and he refused to join his nascent Bolshevik Party. By August he had returned to Bucharest, having won only promises for money and weapons to support his actions. He had no plans to go back to Switzerland. He wrote to a friend, "Understand that the whole polemic among the parties was swallowing me up. Had I stayed, I would have been completely enveloped in the strife and quarrel."

At meetings held in the small vineyard next to Arbore-Ralli's house, Matyushenko organized a committee of sailors to coordinate the revolutionary work of his former crewmates. In the months since the mutiny's end, the sailors had spread throughout Romania. Some lived in Bucharest and Constanza, working at factories. Others left for the countryside to farm, forming communes of seventy to eighty men. Matyushenko traveled frequently to meet with them, but spent the lion's share of his time in Constanza, planning another Black Sea Fleet rebellion and sending propaganda into Russia.